American Horror Story's Death Valley Premiere Is A Mess - Digital Spy

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American Horror Story season 10 episode 6 spoilers follow.

We're not going to say the American Horror Story team forgot to take their black pills before writing Death Valley. No, that would be far too obvious. But while watching the second half of season 10 begin, we couldn't help but wonder if this is what the pale people would write if someone visited that Provincetown cemetery and propped up a typewriter on one of the graves.

That's not to say it's all bad though. 'Take Me To Your Leader' actually starts off really strong with a black-and-white opening that channels the very best of '50s alien horror smushed together with the gorier aspects of traditional American Horror Story.

death valley, american horror story season 10

We'd suggest necking a shot every time someone's head explodes, but we also don't want to be responsible for your subsequent hospital visit, so we'll just stick to commending the gorgeous visuals (in that 1954 segment, at least).

Sarah Paulson pops in again all-too-briefly, followed by Lily Rabe's take on Amelia Earhart (!?!), the real-life aviator who disappeared two decades previously. Well, she's back, and with this being a Lily Rabe character, Amelia is of course pregnant, but with what remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, President Dwight D Eisenhower (played by Arrow's Neal McDonough) attends an alien autopsy which takes a sucky turn, for real though, when the base is attacked by gooey alien blobs and the explosive housewife from this episode's opening scene.

American Horror Story has a new Supreme

And then, just as things are getting good, boom. We jump forward in time to meet some new, seemingly unrelated characters who spend far too long discussing everything from the Luddite movement to cum allergies. Yep, really.

That all turns out to be an obnoxious preamble to the group's camping trip, where they soon encounter aliens who impregnate them all with their sloppy tentacles. And yes, we do mean all of them, because by the end of the episode, even the guys are pregnant. Will the alien babies be delivered out of their butts? Or perhaps somewhere even more personal than that? And most importantly, of all, how much do we actually care?

That last question is particularly important for the rest of season ten moving forward. While it's obvious that this modern-day era will eventually connect with the '50s segment, the two couldn't be more different in terms of both style and quality.

Yes, we are more than just a little resentful that newbies like Kaia Gerber were given more screen time than Sarah Paulson or Lily Rabe. But more importantly than that, this second half felt like a spin-off reject rather than what we've usually come to expect from the main show – and it's not like American Horror Stories was consistently good anyway, not by any means.

From the dialogue to the acting, we were left wondering at points if these modern scenes are actually supposed to be bad on purpose, echoing our thoughts on weaker episodes of the spin-off.

As it stands, we know far more about the guys eating ass than we do about the alien threat, and while mysteries are of course this show's bread and butter, that doesn't mean all of this pointless, shallow sex talk can act as a stand-in for actual characterisation. (To clarify, not all sex talk is pointless, but right now, their horny habits are literally all we know about these vacuous characters.)

AHS s10 finale almost fixed the show's big problem

What's most disappointing though is how the writers behind American Horror Story decided to split this season in the first place. The idea of halving Double Feature into two shorter stories definitely helped improve the show's familiar pacing issues, even if all the goodwill that Red Tide built up was sunk by that terrible ending. But now that we're in the second half, viewers are forced to contend with yet another split within Death Valley as well.

That would have been tricky to manage at the best of times, let alone when the second half drags everything down like a particularly horny alien tentacle. Yet of course, we'll keep watching. Just like the kids freely run towards that dead cow stench in the desert, we too will keep throwing ourselves into new episodes until the pale people finally get bored with their typewriter and hand it back to the writers behind (most of) Red Tide.

American Horror Story: Double Feature airs on FX and Hulu in the US. Season 10 will arrive October 20th on Disney+ in the UK. Catch up on series 1-8 on Netflix, with seasons 1-9 available to buy on Amazon Prime Video.